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Ubuntu 14.04 review: Missing the boat on big changes

While a new kernel should mean better performance, Canonical's UI troubles persist.

Scott Gilbertson
- Apr 23, 2014 1:00 pm UTC

The Unity desktop

While Canonical is playing it safe with most things in this release, given the LTS nature of 14.04, there are some surprising and very welcome changes to the Unity interface. The biggest news on the Unity front is that Canonical has done an about-face on a number of long-requested features previously rejected by the Ubuntu development team.

Menu in windows

The first and most notable change in Unity is a new option to turn off the global menu bar and put application menus back in the window.

Part of the rationale behind the decision to move the window menus out of the window and up into the global position was to save space. This made sense back when Unity was an interface for netbooks and other small screen devices, but it doesn't hold water on a 27" HD monitor.

There are other arguments for global menus, notably Fitts' Law, which, among other things, says that it's easier to throw your mouse to the top of the screen than it is to try to hit any target within the screen. That's true, and countless studies have confirmed it, but there's a counter-argument to be made that it's equally difficult to get all the way back to where your cursor was before you went to the global menu with that flick of the mouse.

It would seem that there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and which is best depends on how you work; it would be disingenuous to try to categorically say one is better than the other.

Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distros that uses something like a global menu, and, until this release, that was the only option. Now, though, you can opt to go back to window-level menus if you prefer that approach.

The most notable global menu in a desktop OS is undoubtedly the Mac OS, which has used a global menu since it debuted in 1984. But the reason OS X's menu works so well isn't just because Fitts' law is followed; it's also that the menus and the items in them are standardized across the OS.

For example, preferences are always in the application menu and always accessed with the keyboard shortcut cmd-,. That consistency makes for a simpler, more unified user experience. The user never has to think, now where are the preferences in this new app I just installed? Likewise they don't have to look to see what the keyboard shortcut is to open the app's preferences window, they just hit cmd-, and the preferences window opens.

Ubuntu, for reasons beyond its control, will never be able to achieve this level of OS interface consistency, which makes its global menu next to useless.

In fact, the Unity global menu is not a global menu at all, it's a window-specific menu that got kicked up to the top bar for reasons only known to Ubuntu developers.

No matter what kind of window is open in the application, the global menu in OS X remains the same. In Unity, however, as Ryan Paul noted in his review of Ubuntu 12.04, "despite displaying the menu contents outside of the window, the menus are still window-specific. By design, the global menu bar displays the menu of the focused window. This proves awkward in some applications with dialogs and multiple windows."

It's not just awkward, it's potentially crazy-making, as it means your menu items (which you can't see until you drag the cursor up to the top of the window) may or may not actually be there depending on the type of window you have in the foreground right now.

Say you're browsing the Web with Firefox and you decide you want to edit a bookmark. You click the Firefox menu item "show all bookmarks," which opens a new window with Firefox's bookmark manager. But of course this window does not have a window-level menu, which means your "global" menu at the top of the screen is now unavailable. That also means your keyboard shortcuts won't work, a curious bit of consistency I suppose. So in this window, when you hit control-Q (Quit) nothing happens. Do the same when a regular browser window is at the forefront and Firefox will happily quit.

This isn't a problem limited to browsers. The same situation arises in the Nautilus file manager. Just open a Property inspector window and see what the "global" application menu does (hint: there suddenly isn't one). If you create a file or even just open a new window with a keyboard shortcut, you'll need to first make sure that a "normal" Nautilus window has focus.

Nothing in Ubuntu 14.04 fixes the half-implemented nature of Ubuntu's "global" menu. In fact, nothing has changed at all in the default installation of 14.04. You'll have to go hunting in the system settings to find the new option to put menus back in the windows (it's tucked away under the Behavior tab in the Appearances panel), but at least it's now an option.

Naturally Ubuntu has put it's own spin on what window-level menus look like. Unlike other operating systems, which typically put window-based menus in a row under the window title bar, Ubuntu has opted to put them in the actual title bar. The window-level menu is, as with the global menu, hidden away until you hover your mouse over the window.

One nice touch is that the menu items in the title bar manage to never get in the way of click-and-drag operations on the window. Canonical's developers deserve much credit for making sure that this potentially disastrous UI decision actually works without a hitch.

As a former OS X user, I would prefer to see Canonical try to make a true global menu that works as well as Apple's, but in lieu of that, I can at least have the consistency of menus in the window.

Minimize to launcher

The second much-requested feature that Canonical has finally granted its users is an option to minimize windows to the launcher by clicking the icon in the launcher.

The default behavior remains the same; when you click an icon in the Unity launcher, the application launches. If the application is already running, then it is brought to the foreground. If you click it again (when it's already the frontmost application) nothing happens.

There's been a long-standing request to change this last behavior to mirror what you'll find in several other desktops, namely that clicking the icon of the frontmost application will minimize that window.

To enable this behavior in Ubuntu 14.04, you'll need to install and open the Compiz Settings Manager and click the Unity plugin, where you'll see an option that says "Minimize Single Window Applications (Unsupported)."

Despite the name, you can minimize multiple windows. If you have two or more windows open, and you click once on the icon in the launcher, the application will be brought to the front if it isn't already. Click again and it will move to the Unity window spread/switcher mode with the windows arrayed on a grid. Click the launcher icon again, and all windows will be minimized. Click a fourth time, and the window that had focus when all the windows were minimized will be brought back to the front while any other windows remain hidden.

Technically this feature is considered experimental and unsupported, but in my testing there were no issues and everything worked, if not quite as the wording would lead you to expect, at least consistently.

Small changes that make Unity in 14.04 more usable

To animate resizing a window in previous releases, Ubuntu used a yellow rectangle to show the size of the window. The yellow rectangle is still used with window snapping, but resizing now uses live window animation. The live window resizing was an option in 13.10, but this is the first time it has been enabled by default.

There's another useful new feature half-hidden in the application window spread view, that is, the view you get when you click the Unity Launcher icon for an app with multiple open windows.

In 14.04, if you just start typing in the spread view (there's no text entry box, which is why it qualifies as half-hidden), Ubuntu will filter your windows and highlight the one that matches your search. If you keep dozens of windows open in a single app and frequently lose track of what's where, this makes a quick way to find what you're after. This feature becomes even handier if you add a keyboard shortcut to toggle the window spread view (by default there isn't one, but you can set one in the Compiz Settings Manager >> Window Management >> Scale and then click the Binding Tab).

With a keyboard shortcut you can activate the window spread view, type to find the window you want and switch to it without ever taking your hands off the keyboard.This would be a fantastic tool if it could spread out tabs within an application—particularly Web browsers—but it doesn't; it's only a window-level feature.

The Unity dash

If you upgrade to every new Ubuntu release, there's nothing new to see in Dash of 14.04. If you stick with LTS releases, though, the Dash has some very big changes you may have heard about—namely that, starting with 12.10, by default the Unity Dash will forward your search terms on to Canonical's servers which then query all manner of Web services, including Amazon.com.

There are two things annoying about this. First it clutters your search results with (often NSFW) junk when all you want is to find a file. The second and the far more serious problem is that it gives Canonical a massive amount of data about you.

Enlarge/ Do you want to open the Ubuntu Software Center or buy some music? That's something only you and Canonical get to know.

When it debuted in 12.10, the online search tools caused a privacy uproar with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) calling for Canonical to remove what in many users' eyes amounts to spyware.

Nothing has changed on this front since 12.10 was released. By default your searches are still sent to Canonical and on to, well, who knows really? Which is why we suggest disabling this feature by completely uninstalling it in the Ubuntu Software Center.

There has been some talk of Ubuntu offering more fine-grained controls over how and where your data is sent, but as of this release that hasn't happened. The privacy controls are still more or less the same—a single on or off switch controls all your online search tools (not to be confused with the online accounts privacy controls, which do offer more fine-grained control over which apps can access your accounts).

The good news is that it looks like Canonical is finally going to make the online search components of Ubuntu opt-in, though not—some might argue conveniently not—in time for this LTS release. If you're just one person upgrading, turning off these features isn't that big of a deal, and the EFF has some instructions on how to do it. A couple clicks and you're done.

If you're upgrading an enterprise-level deployment of Ubuntu and you have thousands of machines to deal with, disabling the online search features in each one is going to be a pain. Enough of a pain that you just might want to skip this release and wait for the next LTS in two years (or move to another distro). After all, Ubuntu 12.04 won't reach the end of its LTS lifespan until April 2017.